Google Maps results are based on Google My Business listings, and on this guide, we will learn all the ins and outs of optimizing our Google My Business listing to rank higher. Without further ado, let us begin with the first one.

1. Make Sure to Include Complete, Up-To-Date, and Comprehensive Information

The pieces of information you put on Google My Business will be used by Google to determine your business’s relevance and credibility. Make sure to input accurate and up-to-date information at least for these:

• Your business’s Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), the most vital pieces of information not only for Google My Business, but for all business directories and listings.
• Your website address, Google will “crawl” your site to determine your Google Maps listing’s relevance, so this is also very important
• Description: remember that this should be a description about what your business do, and not what you sell (i.e. “a bookstore” not “books”). Your description serves two main purposes: you can include your focus keywords here to optimize your ranking, and you can also optimize it to attract human audience. Provide clear, engaging information about your business.
• Category: similar principle to the above, your categories should be about what your business does. You can use more than one categories, and this can be a good opportunity to tap into all the possible markets.
• Attributes, here you can inform your customers about your business’s special attributes, for example, if you have “outdoor seating”, you can check the available attribute. This can be useful to highlight unique values of your business.

You will especially need to pay extra attention to your NAP information. Google will index your NAP across the web. If someone mentions your NAP on their site, it will be regarded as a local citation, which has the same value as backlinks in regular SEO. So, make sure your NAP information is consistent with what is currently listed on your site, as well as what’s listed on other listings and directories.

Information inconsistency can significantly impact your local ranking negatively. If you have any changes to your NAP, make sure to update it not only on Google My Business, but also on all your listings and citations.

Also, here are some tips and tricks you can use when optimizing these pieces of information:

• Make sure your listed address matches the correct coordinates on Google Maps. Also, check your zip codes and make sure they are consistent across all your listings. For example, if you use 5-digit zip code on one of your listing, use it on all. The same will apply if you use 9-digit code. However, most listings will only allow the 5-digit zip code, so it’s a safer bet overall.
• For phone number, it is actually better to have a local number listed instead of your national or regional number.
• Description, category, and attributes are good opportunities to optimize for keywords. However, make sure they are not over-optimized and make sure all these keywords occur naturally for human readers.
• For business categories, this is a great guide listing all the different categories available, and you can use it to determine the proper category(s) for your business.
• For both categories and attributes, the aim is to be as specific as possible. If you are a pizzeria, specify that you are a pizzeria instead of just “restaurant”. If you offer outdoor eating areas, specify it in attributes.

In short, take some time to optimize the basic information on your Google My Business listing. Now, let’s move on to the next aspect.

2. Optimizing Reviews: Encouraging Positive Ones and Handling Negative Ones

Reviews are a really important aspect for local SEO, as well as for your business’s growth in general. Not only good reviews are an important ranking signal for Google Maps, positive reviews will attract customers to your business while negative ones can significantly hurt your revenue.

Nowadays, 86% consumers read reviews before making any purchases, especially when considering local businesses. So, if your business doesn’t have a lot of positive reviews, you can miss out on a lot of opportunities.

So, the big question is: how can we get more reviews? It is actually fairly simple. Ask your existing, happy customers. Google Maps and Google My Business actually encourage you to get positive reviews, as you can send your customers a link with just a few steps.

To encourage your customers, you might want to offer incentives, which actually is a common practice for many local businesses. For example, you can offer a special discount or even a freebie for customers who left a review for you, or posted something positive about your business in their social media.

However, we shouldn’t only focus on reviews on Google Maps. Although it is never confirmed by Google, many have agreed that reviews on third-party sites—especially major ones like Yelp or TripAdvisor— are also accounted by Google as ranking signals. In fact, quite recently Google encourages placing reviews from Yelp and other sites on your site.

In short: encourage as many positive reviews as you can on as many platforms as you can.

Now, how about handling negative reviews? The basic principle here is to respond to ALL reviews, both positive and negative ones. A lot of consumers prefer businesses that respond to negative reviews, but obviously we will need to respond properly. Here are the key considerations when responding to negative reviews:

1. Understand that there are at least two different kinds of negative reviews. First are the valid ones coming from real customers with real issues. Second are the ones coming from fake customers, often with malicious intents. Recognizing these two will be very important here, so you won’t make any false accusations.
2. Don’t ever deliver false promises when responding to negative reviews. If you don’t have the solution for a specific problem, simply tell them “we are working on it, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible”. If you say you’ll be back with them within 24 hours, do so.
3. If you have sufficient proofs that a negative review is fake, you can ask Google Maps (or other review sites) to take it out. Depending on the case, you might also want to pursue legal actions to discourage similar cases.
4. Remember that for valid negative reviews, there are always the underlying issues. For example, if you received a lot of negative feedback about the long queue on your premise, there might be actual issues with your queuing system. Unless you address this problem first, you’ll keep getting similar reviews.

3. Optimizing Images and Photos

The first thing that should be addressed is that images and photos are not direct ranking factors for Google Maps. However, according to Google My Business itself, businesses with photos get 40% more direction requests. In short, you’ll get more conversions, which can indirectly affect your ranking (when a lot of people request for directions to your business or call your number directly from Google Maps result, Google will see your listing as relevant, which can boost your ranking.

Your profile photo is the first thing a prospect will notice when they are searching on Google Maps, and in Google My Business, you can upload four kinds of images:

• Regular photos: you can upload any kinds of photos here, but Google may review your photos for quality. Your customers can also tag your listing with a photo, which will be under “Photos tagged of your business”.
• Profile photo: self-explanatory, you can choose one photo to represent your identity. You can also choose photos tagged by other people as your profile photo.
• Cover photo: a landscape photo on the very top of you page. You can use it to set the mood of your listing, or to show interesting qualities of your business (i.e., your restaurant’s ambiance)
• Videos: everyone is streaming videos nowadays, and this is a great opportunity to attract customers by investing in engaging videos.

To optimize your images, here are some quick tips to follow:

• The image’s format should be in JPG or PNG, with a size of between 10KB and 5MB
• 720px tall and 720px wide minimum resolution
• Make sure your photos are in-focus, well-lit, and don’t use excessive filters. Google prefers images that represent reality, and as mentioned, Google might review your images for quality
• Optimize the metadata of your images by optimizing the EXIF data, and you might want to check out this tool to help you.

4. Use Google Posts To Engage Your Customers

Google Posts is a fairly new feature of Google Maps and Google My business, and was just introduced in late 2017.

As the name suggest, with Posts you can post content related to your business such as:

• Informing your audience for new products or services, complete with interesting photos
• Inviting people to join an upcoming event
• Announcing various news, for example, if your business just received an award or even a good review from reputable reviewer
• You can use interesting gifs to attract your audience.
• You can also include CTA buttons like “Buy”, “Learn More”, “Sign Up”, and so on.

Again, Posts is not a direct ranking signal, but the more engagement you get, the more Google will perceive your business as relevant and credible.

Creating a Post is fairly simple, the “Posts” option should appear on the left-hand side of your Google My Business sidebar. If not, probably you haven’t verified your Google my business account, and you can check here to learn how.

You can then add texts and images to your post, and here are the important things to consider:

• When adding images, keep in mind that Google uses a 4:3 ratio (so your minimum size should be 400×300 pixels). Google will crop your image to fit the aspect ratio, but make sure it’s high-quality, a proper representation of your business.
• The maximum words allowed in a post is 300. However, if you use a CTA button, only around 70 characters will show on mobile devices. The entire texts will be shown if you don’t use any CTAs.
• Content is everything. Don’t always aim to sell, but you can engage your audience with various creative ways. Your goal here is engagement.
• Google offers a very useful insights feature, so track your posts’ performance and adjust your tactics accordingly
• A post will stay for seven days, but you can set a shorter time period. A week is not a long time, so it is very important to be very specific and time-sensitive with your posts.

Posts can be a very effective way to engage your audience on Google Maps, so you might want to plan ahead and create a content marketing plan specific for Google Posts.

5. Building Local Citations

Local citations are the equivalent of backlinks in regular SEO. A citation, by definition, is when an online entity (website, blog, social media profile) mentions your NAP. The more citations you have, the more relevant your business will be perceived. According to a report by MOZ, citations account for 13% of ranking signals.

The most important thing to consider when building local citations is consistency. Your NAP information must be consistent at all times. Not only inconsistent NAP won’t bring value to your business, Google might downgrade your ranking if there are too many variations of you NAP.

So, how can we build local citations? We can start by listing our business on major business directories like Yelp, Facebook Places, TripAdvisor, and so on. Then, we can continue building citations on specific online directories according to your industry/niche and location. A simple Google search can help you with this, for example, if you are a restaurant in Texas, do a quick Google search for “Texas business directory”, “Texas restaurant directory”, and other similar search phrases. You can also check these lists to help you further:

• Moz’s top local citations list (by category)
• Moz’s top local citations list (by city)

So, the keys to success here are quantity and consistency, and there will be a lot of hard work involved. Not only you will need to build as many citations and possible, you will need to check whether all citations are consistent. Then, in cases when your business change address or phone number, you will need to update all listings manually.

This can be a massive work, so it might be a good idea to hire a local SEO service especially to help you with building your business’s local citations.

End Words

The keys in optimizing your Google My Business listing are accurate information, quantity of local citations, and consistency. It is technically not difficult to execute, but will require a significant time investment as well as hard work.

This is where an SEO expert/consultant can help you, especially to maintain consistency in building your local citations.

The post Tips To Optimize Your Google My Business Listing appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Google Maps results are based on Google My Business listings. So, one of the main considerations in improving your Google Maps ranking is by optimizing your Google My Business listing. Here are the steps provides by SEO consultant Mike.

1. Including Optimized and Complete information

Google My Business is essentially a place where you can list information about your business, and these pieces of information will be used by Google to determine your business’s relevance, credibility, and ultimately, ranking.

So, the first thing to optimize on your Google My Business listing is your business’s information, especially these areas:

• Your NAP—your business’s name, address and phone number. These are the most important pieces of information about your business on the internet.
• Your site’s URL. Google will crawl your site to determine its relevance in tandem with your GMB listing.
• Description. There’s an ongoing debate whether optimizing your description for keywords will actually benefit your ranking. However, there’s no harm in doing so as long as you include these keywords naturally. Focus on attracting and engaging your human audience.
• Category. Choose the primary category that best represents what your business does. You can also choose other relevant sub-categories, this is a good opportunity not only for ranking purposes, but to attract a wider audience
• Attributes. Use attributes to highlight unique features about your business. For example, whether your restaurant offer outdoor seating or vegetarian menu.

Pay extra attention to your NAP. Make sure it is up-to-date and accurate, and if you have any mention of your NAP on the internet (local citations, more on this below), make sure to maintain consistency.

Here are some extra tips you can use to optimize this aspect:

1. Make sure your listed address matches the proper Google Maps’ coordinates, same for zip-codes.Again, aim for consistency.
2. It’s better to list a local phone number instead of a national or regional number.
3. Don’t over-optimize category, attributes, and description. Again, make sure they are natural and comprehensive for human readers.
4. Use this guide to help you in choosing your categories.
5. Remember to be as specific as possible when choosing categories and attributes.

2. Soliciting Reviews and Handling Negative Ones

The quantity of positive reviews is a very important ranking signal for local SEO. However, there’s also the obvious benefit of boosting your conversions and revenue: more and more people read reviews before making purchases, especially when considering local brick and mortar businesses.

Studies suggested that up to 8ryh6% of consumers nowadays read reviews before deciding on any purchases. So, if you don’t have enough positive reviews, it will simply hurt your conversion rates significantly. Yet, how can we get more positive reviews? There are at least three main approaches:

• Just ask. Sometimes, all it takes is simply to ask your customers to leave a review. The key here is not only to ask politely (and as engaging as possible), but also to find the right timing. For example, send an email asking for a review for customers who just repurchase your product (indicating they are indeed happy with your brand), or if you track online engagement, send an email for those who frequently visited your product listing page and blog.

• Incentives. Pretty self-explanatory, you can offer incentives to existing customers in exchange of their reviews (and social media mentions). You can combine this with the first approach to optimize your chances.

• Responding to existing reviews. If you frequently respond to existing reviews (yes, even the bad ones), your audience are more likely to leave their own reviews. They will have the perception that their issues will be responded quickly, and similarly, their positive feedback will be appreciated.

As you can see, managing negative reviews is also a significant aspect of soliciting more positive reviews. You might want to check out this guide on online reputation management to get started. However, here are some quick tips on this aspect:

• Differentiate between valid negative reviews coming from real customers and fake reviews with malicious intent. If you have sufficient proofs, you can ask Google Maps (or other review sites) to take down fake reviews. You might also want to pursue legal actions depending on the severity of the case.
• Respond quickly and politely, and don’t offer promises you can’t deliver.
• Remember that for valid bad reviews, there is usually an underlying issue(s). If you don’t fix these issues in the first place, you’ll keep getting the same negative feedbacks over and over again.

3. Engaging Your Customers Through Google Posts

Google Posts was introduced in late 2017 as a feature of Google My Business. As a side note, only verified Google My Business listing will get this feature, so if you can’t access Google Posts via your GMB dashboard, chances are you haven’t verified your listing.

With Google Posts, you can post content about your business, such as:

• Announcing new products or services with engaging images
• Event invitation, both for online and offline events
• Using gifs and other engaging media to attract your audience
• Announcing various business-related news.

You can include CTA buttons (“Buy”, “Learn More”, etc.) with your posts. But remember that if you use a CTA button, only around 70 characters will be displayed on mobile devices, compared to 300 characters without.

Engagement is an important ranking factor for Google Maps ranking, so take advantage of Google Posts to attract more audience. Besides, there’s also the benefit of attracting more prospects and improving conversion rates.

4. Using and Optimizing Images

According to Google themselves, business listings that include photos get up to 40% more conversion rates from requests of directions to phone calls to actual visits. Again, the more people engaged your listing, the higher it will rank.

When optimizing for photos, here are some key areas to consider:

• You can use all kinds of images and photos, but Google can review your photos for quality and appropriation. Generally, Google prefers photos that can represent the reality of your business, so avoid using too much filter and editing.
• The image format should be in PNG or JPG with a size between 10KB and 5MB
• The minimum resolution should be 720px x720px.
• Take photos within (or nearby) your business location, Google will crawl your photo location metadata and this can affect your ranking.
• You can also upload videos up to 30 seconds long. Use this opportunity to highlight unique qualities of your business.

5. Building Local Citations

Local citations refer to any mention of your business’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information on the internet. Citation is a very important ranking signal, and there are generally two main ways to get citations: build relationships with authoritative press, sites, blogs, and social media profiles. The second approach is to list your business in various online directories:

• Google My Business is technically an online directory, and the most important factor in implementing local SEO.
• Start with major online directories like Facebook Places, Yelp, and so on depending on your niche. Check out this list to help you out in this aspect.
• You can then continue with smaller online directories depending on your location and industry type. Use this list for top local directory by category, and this list for citations based on city.

The key in building local citations is to maintain consistency, especially for your NAP information. If, for example, you just changed your business address, you will need to update all of these listings. Inconsistent information not only can mislead your audience, but can significantly hurt your Google Maps ranking in the long run.

End Words

To optimize your Google My Business listing, the most important factors are accurate and up-to-date information, quantity of local citations, number of positive reviews, and consistency of information.

The post Effective Strategies To Improve Your Google My Business Ranking appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Focusing on local SEO is the solution you need to find valuable customers in your local area. Once found by prospective clients in your home city, you could find enough loyal customers to keep you profitable for years to come.

All of this might sound simple to accomplish, despite requiring a revision to your digital marketing campaign. Local SEO is a different approach that’s going to require some work and tweaks to content you already have out there.

If you’ve already mastered the basics of SEO, take time to learn this new technique to assure Google success. Google takes local SEO seriously, and it’s something your own business needs to do. Don’t think local SEO doesn’t matter, because it’s essential if you are a small business looking to corner your local market.

The results you’ll see from doing local SEO right are also exponential. Here’s some examples of why it’s important, plus how you can go about making it work so you increase your visibility on all SERPs.

Examples of Why Local SEO is Important

To understand the importance behind local SEO, you have to look at real-world cases. You’ll find three key things that local SEO expert can help you with to drive more businesses:

• You can increase your call rates by ten times when people know how to find you faster online. Contact information is a vital part of local SEO that often gets ignored. By prominently displaying something as simple as your phone number, you’re going to increase calls when someone finds your business during a digital search.
• Website visits are going to increase ten times as well thanks to prospective leads finding your site at the top of search engines. When you’re on the first page of local listings on Google, you won’t get lost in the dust of nearby competitors trying to steal away your customers.
• Relying strictly on organic SEO might not be enough, requiring some special local SEO tricks to rank higher. Adding Google Maps is known for helping businesses get found faster during quick mobile searches. Adding a Google map works well with Google’s algorithm so you rise to the top in local search placement.
• Improving your online reviews gives you up to a 30% increase in business. If you haven’t honed in on what people say about you online, it’s time to take a look. You might discover a lot of negative reviews initially, but you have ways to improve these using local SEO tactics.

Now that you see what local SEO does for you, how do you go about implementing the things mentioned above? Let’s take a look at the technical steps needed to take on what might seem initially impossible to fix.

Using a Local Phone Number

One of the first necessary steps to take for effective local SEO is to create a local phone number. The most important element to this is consistency as Search Engine Land noted a couple of years ago.

Nothing’s changed in two years. Keeping one local number consistent through all your online citations is guaranteed to help search engine rankings. Plus, make sure your local number goes on your site’s location page. Without this, search engines may not find the number and ruin chances to make any significant local SEO impact.

It’s also worth reminding you need to create separate local numbers for each location of your business. Keeping one number for all can create confusion when people search for your business on their smartphones or tablets.

Keeping a Consistent NAP Across the Web

A NAP isn’t a nap in capital letters, as much as we might want it to be. NAP is really an acronym for “Name, Address, and Phone Number.” Keeping this consistent across all digital channels is a major factor in whether you do local SEO well.

It’s unfortunate that some businesses forget to place basic contact information on their website and social channels. A lot of people looking you up online simply want to know where you are and how they can reach you by phone.

Maybe you’ve added NAP on your website, though what about all your social media accounts and other online sources? Is there a consistency, or do you only have specific information in diffuse places?

Google cross-references this information across a variety of places. They do this to confirm you’re a legitimate business to develop instant customer trust.

Other than your website and social channels, where should you place your NAP to widen your exposure? A good idea is to go to online directories and place it there. Sites like InfoUSA, Yelp, and Foursquare are good examples so Google can pick this information up during crawls.

Verifying Google Maps

If you’re new to using Google Maps, you shouldn’t worry about it being complex to use. When you set one up on your website, you’re going to immediately increase your chances of being found.

It’s more than just capitulating to a Google product. Different factors in your Google Map determine how well you adhere to Google’s algorithm. In turn, it gives a more visual way for people to find you, especially on a mobile device while out driving around.

Take a look at some things you can add to your Google Map to increase your search rank:

• Be sure the address and contact info you have on your map lines up with what’s on your website. Otherwise, it’s going to lead to online confusion again, including Google punishment.
• Consider using Google My Business since anything you add there automatically goes on your Google Map, hence increasing your local SEO strength.
• Online reviews are now embedded into Google Maps, even if you need to attend to this separately as part of your local SEO strategy.
• A lot of new features are available on Google Maps that allow you to place additional information for people to find you faster. Some of these features include traffic information, plus the often-used Street View function.
• Embed your map on your website, including making your phone number clickable. Ideally, you should place your address in the footer of all your webpages.

Fixing Bad Online Reviews

Have you taken the time to see what people are really saying about you online? No doubt it’s daunting when you don’t want to see any negative reviews about the business you’ve worked hard to develop.

It’s essential you take time to see what online reviewers say. Even if you have more negative reviews than you thought you had, you can do some things to amend the problem.

Local SEO is affected deeply by online reviews, so you need to take action. No matter if you find years of negative reviews, a lot of that can become washed over on search engines with the proper techniques.

First, make an effort to create more positive reviews, which may involve some ingenuity. Since you can’t outright ask for positive reviews without punishment from places like Yelp, you can take more sideline actions.

Inc. notes you should link all positive online reviews to your website to create more local SEO juice. Also, include direct links to your profile on review sites to encourage people to write a review.  In emails, you can include a direct link to Yelp.

Some other steps you can take to dilute negative reviews:

• Try responding directly to a negative reviewer and offer to correct a problem they called out. They may write a positive review later, or edit their previous negative comments.
• Look out for other review sites other than Yelp, because they could still affect your local SEO negatively. A lot of review sites are out there, and focusing on them to get more positive reviews helps your SERPs.
• Steer all responses to negative reviews with the idea you’ll amend things for any customer thinking they received bad service. This is going to mean not using canned responses and being genuine. Starting conversations creates better clarity and helps determine what the initial problem was.

How Long Will Results from Local SEO Take?

Expect about three to five months to see results from the above actions. Always remember that overall SEO of your site is equally important. Focusing on global SEO and local SEO helps you establish solid placement on Google and brings customers in from all corners.

You want customers for your online and offline store to maintain their loyalty for years to come. Finding them on a local basis helps sustain this so you don’t have to solely compete on a national or even international level.

The post Local SEO Tactics and Strategies to Increase Traffic and Rankings appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.